For the last three years The Studio team has worked to grow DCC’s capacity to innovate and improve the quality of its services. From mid April we will move to other departments and bring with us the valuable knowledge we have gained. But don’t switch off! We will still use The Studio blog and twitter to let you know about our new projects and innovation in DCC.
We wanted to say a big thank you to all who have supported us along this very interesting journey and leave you with the best Studio moments.
The Studio started in 2010 with Deirdre Ni Raghallaigh, Jeremy Wales and Sarah Scannell, who had been working on the Designing Dublin, Learning to Learn project. They were later joined Pauline Riordan, Ruth Dowling, John Conroy, Mary Mooney and Zaira Rivera.
The first Staff Ideas Scheme launched in December 2010 with snow covering the ground so it was no surprise that 20% of the 300 ideas received were about snow. The second Staff Ideas scheme started in January 2012 and the third in September 2013. Over the three years, 587 ideas were submitted and 76 shortlisted to be tested.
We worked with the Grafton Street team in our first street engagement in Spring 2011. More engagement work followed: Public Realm, Mountjoy Square, Docklands, Ageing Well Network, Play in Sandymount, directly elected Mayor and Bull Island. Interested in street engagement? Here is our street conversations toolkit
In March 2010 The Studio started working on Data Dublin, which later became Dublinked . It launched officially in October 2011 in Wood Quay venue with Adam Greenfield as guest speaker. Over the last three years the Dublinked team have been working to open up access to information on transport, planning, environment and other public data. The idea is to make this data freely available on a regional open data portal, for others to reuse and develop new applications and services. To date, there have been over 38 new products, from a new planning web service to a number of journey planner apps and data visualisations of city services. Through the Dublinked Innovation Network, the four Dublin Local Authorities are collaborating with researchers, developers and entrepreneurs across the Dublin region to prototype future solutions to city problems using our city streets and services.
The Studio has worked on several process improvement projects internally. It also run service design projects, which included the development of a new online filming application prototype and looking at opportunities to improve the grants systems administered by the Culture, Recreation and Amenity Department.
In September 2012 started The Dublin Project, a collaboration with the Institute without Boundaries and Dublin Institute of Technology. The Dublin Project gave us the opportunity of learning a new, very interesting way of tackling ‘wicked’ problems: charrettes. In November 2012 DCC, IWB and DIT host the Dublin charrette attended by 40 people. You can check the results here and the video here.
As part of the collaboration with IWB, in February 2013 Deirdre and Jeremy spoke at a large charrette in Toronto attended by over 200 students and professionals (You can see all the information and photos here). The final presentation of The Dublin Projects was in July 2013. Here is the book produced
At the beginning of July 2013 we hosted our own charrette with partners Dublin City Enterprise Board and Digital Hub. It was called Startup City. During two and a half days 82 participants produced proposals on 8 themes affecting start-ups in the city.
On Wednesday 26th of February staff from across Dublin City Council took to Twitter for our first ever tweetathon. The objectives for the day was to engage with the public in a different way, to allow staff to share the work they do on a daily basis and to highlight the variety of services provided by Dublin City Council. The response we received from both the public and staff far exceeded our expectations – #MyDCCDay had over 1,334 mentions from 500 unique authors and we reached a potential audience of over 3 million.
A project that has just started and will be ongoing will be Love the Lanes. It is a call out for ideas and creative possibilities to help us rethink how we use the back lanes of Temple Bar. Would you like to participate? Have a look here
The Studio Team
